"We should have been doing this for years": How a radical scheme in one London borough helped over 300 families avoid eviction

If you want to know where people are being evicted in the UK, don’t look to the poorest towns in the UK—look to the towns where the poorest families live in private housing. There are over 170 evictions a day in England Wales. The majority of which involve young children.

Evictions are a costly business. Housing Associations can lose up to £30,000 on every social housing eviction. And yet the cost of avoiding eviction for an individual family is relatively low.

Last month, the University of Sheffield published a study which looked at a scheme pioneered by the Lewisham Plus Credit Union (LPCU). For nine years, Lewisham used a £85,000 grant from the council to provide interest-free loans to those at risk of eviction.

Their study found that the scheme saved Lewisham Council over £1 million in temporary accommodation costs and helped 300 families avoid eviction. In other words, it was a total success. But can the key to reducing evictions in Britain really be so simple?

Glenn was evicted from his privately rented flat when he was 45. Having previously done stints in prison for petty crimes, he was now seeking stability. Yet Glenn had not paid his rent for months. He had been switched over to Universal Credit and was facing financial sanctions for missed appointments.

Unlike the previous benefits system, where such sanctions would not affect one’s ability to pay rent—as housing benefit was paid separately—these sanctions had a massive impact.

“They’ll give you sanctions for anything,” Glenn told me, “especially missed appointments, even if they are viable reasons.”

“I once spent an hour on the phone trying to re-arrange an appointment and then got cut off, without having spoken to someone.”

Universal Credit has been a major reason for the increasing number of evictions in Britain. Paul Shamplina, CEO of Landlord Action, tells me that the new benefits system has “caused hardship and anxiety to both tenants and landlords by exacerbating rental loss, mainly as a result of delays and errors in the initial payment.”

The situation doesn’t just hurt those involved. £845 million is spent by the government on temporary accommodation each year, supporting almost 84,000 residents.

And yet, Shamplina thinks around “40-50 per cent of evictions we deal with could have been avoided.”

In a basement off Sydenham High Street littered with files and folders I meet Liam Carlilse, a tall boisterous man. He is wearing a black shirt, sporting funky white-rimmed glasses and an impressive grey goatee. The deputy manager of the LPCU, Carlisle has worked in housing for over 20 years.

About ten years ago, just after the financial crash, he says he had a lot of members saying that they were about to be evicted. They were people who couldn’t get a loan elsewhere or would have had to stump up for the high-interest rates of payday loans.

Carlisle didn’t want to risk his members’ money on high risk loans, so he made a presentation to Lewisham Council. He would help these people avoid being evicted—and the Council wouldn’t have to pay to re-house them. According to him, he sold it as a no-brainer—I believe him—and came out with a £85,000 grant.

The scheme was never advertised as Carlisle knew they would not have had the resources to help all of those in need. For those who participated, however, it was a lifeline.

Over the next nine years, the initial loans given out were repaid and then relent. In total, just over £300,000 was lent out from credit union funds. Carlisle explains that he talked to each recipient about their finances and how they were going to dig themselves out of the hole they were in, saying, “it’s all about dealing with the root.”

He adds, “I want every single borough to wake up to the fact that we should have been doing this for years.”

Professor Bill Lee of the University of Sheffield, who conducted a study on the scheme alongside Carlisle, is unsure why this idea hadn’t been tried before but philosophises that “it is sometimes the simplest solution that we fail to recognise.”

Lee details the unique nature of credit unions, saying “in terms of having an ethos—they are directed solely to the financial wellbeing of the community.”

While Lee credits a lot of the success of Lewisham’s scheme to Carlisle, saying that he had “well established relationships with social landlords and the ear of the local authority,” he hastens to add: “Liam isn’t the only person who has that expertise.”

The ABCUL (Association of British Credit Unions), for instance, is one means of knowledge sharing. Lee notes that credit unions might have the least resources—but they have the most knowledgeable staff.

This year, the government promised to abolish section 21, which allows private landlords to evict tenants with no reason necessary. And yet with people living longer, more divorces, and close to no social affordable housing being built, evictions will continue to be a major issue in Britain.

By 2020, it is feared that up to a million people could be threatened with eviction. In the last year, the Citizens Advice Bureau had over 12,000 inquiries about rent arrears.

Temporary accommodation is a costly solution. There are major steps that need to be taken to solve Britain’s housing problem—but in the meantime, interest-free loans provided by highly skilled members of the community seems, to use Carlisle’s words, a “no-brainer.”